Waiting Room: The Wars Of The Roses

DRAWING ROOM Without the preoccupation with fortification as the guiding force behind both the exterior and interior of the country’s aristocratic strongholds, these types of structures were free to evolve. According to English historian, author, and Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, Dr. Lucy Worsley, as the Wars of the Roses came to an end in the late thirteenth-century so too did the need for defensive requirements of the manor house. In royal palaces, she expounds “this led to the development of a chain of elegant reception rooms: the presence chamber, the privy chamber, the withdrawing chamber, all leading into one another. In the first the King would receive honored strangers. The privy or private chamber was for his intimate

This can get particularly tricky when the room in question was used as a social space as they appear to be especially dynamic by nature in both use and terminology. At the end of the last century, researchers at Gunston Hall, an eighteenth-century Georgian mansion near the Potomac River in Mason Neck, Virginia, and birthplace of United States founding father George Mason, undertook an extensive room use study in the hopes of “better interpreting the complex world of 18th-century Gunston Hall to the 20th-century visitor.” In their attempts to best determine the most accurate naming convention for a room that had clearly originally functioned as a public entertainment space, they began by consulting their collecting of three- hundred and twenty-five probate inventories from the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia for the period of 1740 to 1810. Due to lack of existing probate inventories specifically for the house itself, these inventories were collected specifically to help aide in developing an accurately interpreted furnishing plan for the house. Of 122 room-by-room inventories referenced from within their database—that is, a type of inventory in which individual rooms were listed specifically on the document as opposed to an uninterrupted catalogue of items with no regards to location within the house—researchers discovered that just 6.5% specifically used the term drawing room while 37.7% included use of the term parlor. Adding credence to this numerical evidence as to how Gunston Hall should accurately refer to this room, was documentary evidence that George Mason himself had referred to another space in what researchers interpret as the private, family side of the house as the "little Parlour.” Researchers on the project stressed